C
aroline Moorehead is in many ways an ideal biographer: an assiduous gatherer
of facts, whose books provide a deep and empathetic immersion into whatever
world she has made her subject. Her subjects range widely, from Bertrand
Russell to Freya Stark, Martha Gellhorn and Lucie de la Tour du Pin,
lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette and eyewitness to the French Revolution.

Her latest biography is unusual in that it takes as its subject the lives of a
group of French women resistants who were deported to three of the most
notorious Nazi concentration camps; it is simultaneously a multiple
biography and a detailed anatomy of the nature of friendship. Moorehead has
a profound sympathy for these women and the shared belief of the few who
survived that they simply would not have done so without each other. Their
bond is what helped to keep them alive and it is in a way the subject of her
book.

Their bond is what helped to keep them alive What brought these women
together in the months and years after the fall of France in June 1940 was a
shared commitment to resisting the enemy. The first half of A Train in
Winter describes their disparate backgrounds. Some were highly educated,
sophisticated Parisians, intellectuals involved with the Communist Party,
writers and editors, biochemists and university lecturers; others were
midwives, teachers, nurses or working-class women who ran cafés or supported
their families as dressmakers, cooks, secretaries or factory workers. Some
were still at school – the youngest was only fifteen; others were mothers of
young children. The oldest of the women was sixty-seven. Many had husbands
or lovers who were also in the Resistance. They came from all over France,
from the city and the countryside. Only a handful were Jewish; those who
were generally kept it hidden.

A few of these women became known after the war; Charlotte Delbo, who
published several influential books drawing on her experiences in
Auschwitz-Birkenau; Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, a former
photojournalist who after the war became a Communist politician and
testified at the Nuremberg trials; and two later deportees to Ravensbrück,
Geneviève de Gaulle, niece of the General, who wrote a memoir of her
experiences in the camp, and the anthropologist Germaine Tillion (whose name
is unfortunately misspelled throughout, including in the index, where a
cursory glance might misleadingly suggest that she was related to the
politician and resistant Charles Tillon). But mostly the deportees of Convoy
31000 – the name of the only convoy in the years that the Nazis occupied
France to deport French women resistants to the East – were ordinary people,
who made a choice to act on what they believed rather than sit by. They were
punished cruelly for their bravery.

Part One of A Train in Winter details the individual women’s acts of
resistance, which varied from publishing magazines to delivering pamphlets
in grocery baskets, sheltering resistants in their homes, and helping Jews
cross the demarcation lines. Some, mostly those who lived in and around
Paris, were friends and colleagues, though their stories are rather
sketchily told and the multiple characters at times make it somewhat hard to
follow the many narrative strands and to distinguish between the women. The
book really comes alive when they have been arrested and interned in various
French prisons and internment camps, before being sent in January 1943 to
Auschwitz-Birkenau, and finally, towards the very end of the war, on forced
marches to Ravensbrück and Mauthausen.

Moorehead uses interviews she conducted between 2008 and 2010 with four of the
women, interwoven with material taken from unpublished letters and diaries
and published memoirs by Delbo, de Gaulle, Tillion and others, to construct
an extremely moving and intensely personal history of the Auschwitz universe
as experienced by these women. Only forty-three of the original 230 survived
their imprisonment.

Only forty-three of the original 230 survived As immediate and powerful
as this material is, depending on these testimonies as primary sources
presents certain problems. The literary historian Lawrence Langer has
written extensively on both oral and written Holocaust survivor testimony;
in the essay “Remembering Survival” he writes, “As audience to these
testimonies, we sit in the presence of tainted memory as it dredges up the
anguish of loss with a brave face”. Any writer who depends on survivor
testimony as her primary source of evidence must make the decision whether
to allow the testimony to speak for itself or to attempt an interpretation,
to mediate it in some way. Moorehead makes use of the wealth of historical
material available, detailing daily existence in Birkenau, and freely uses
published memoirs by Delbo (who herself wrote about the problem of writing
memory) and others to describe the inner lives of the women in the camp,
though without necessarily indicating when she has done so; the style of the
narrative makes it impossible to distinguish between material drawn from
memoirs published in the 1950s, just a few years after the Liberation, and
interviews conducted between 2008 and 2010. Yet Moorehead never broaches the
vexed issue of the stability of memory, and elects to privilege narrative
immediacy by not reminding the reader when what is being described is a
memory of an event, or a feeling, that took place sixty years before it was
recounted to her. The consequence of this is that the historian’s rigour is
sometimes sacrificed in favour of the novelist’s empathy: “Rising before
dawn next morning, Gilberte carried her \[sister’s\] body outside and laid
it tenderly by a wall”. Moorehead does not tell us her source for this
incident. It could have been told to her by one of her interviewees; perhaps
she found it in an unpublished text by Gilberte herself. By failing to
contextualize the event and using an omniscient narrator to describe it, and
by embellishing it with the unnecessarily novelistic “tenderly”, Moorehead
robs the episode of its emotional truth.

Nonetheless, A Train in Winter is a powerful and moving book; its significance
is in bringing to a wider, non-French readership the particular and terrible
fate of a group of women whose only crime was to love their country and to
wish to do something to defend it, at a time when its government chose
craven obedience to the occupier, with terrible consequences for so many of
its people.